We performed a comparison between IBM Cognos and Tableau based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: In this comparison, IBM Cognos comes out on top. Users are happier with the support than Tableau users are, and IBM Cognos users also report an ROI.
"Cognos is the best application with dashboards,batch reporting, jobs, events and ad-hoc reporting for business users."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its ease of use, which makes it easily compatible with other tools."
"Security administration tools are powerful and flexible."
"It's enabled us to report directly from our main application systems. We're removing islands of data and we're removing inefficiencies, where people or small divisions had their own store of information."
"IBM Cognos is an excellent solution for tax, planning, budgeting, profit and loss statements and balance sheets."
"This solution allows you to input a wide range of file formats."
"IBM Cognos offers tools so that you can design and develop your own test queries and reporting solutions."
"A positive feature is Report Studio, where we create beautiful, complex reports."
"Its dashboarding is the most valuable. It is easy to create visualizations and dashboards and import Excel sheets and ESP files in Tableau as compared to other tools."
"I really like the interactivity of the dashboards."
"The solution is being delivered to our customer, who appreciates the insights generated from the reports. It is easy for them to drill into the details and use interactive charts."
"It's the ease of use. It is also a self-service tool so it decreases the burden on having centralized IT-type teams or developers."
"The solution deployment was straightforward."
"The feature that is currently most valuable is the import feature where I can link to an Excel data source. I'm not using it with any other data source, such as SQL Server. I directly link it to an Excel sheet, and if I change anything in that Excel sheet, the changed data immediately gets reflected in the virtualization. This is something that is very convenient for me as of now."
"I have found the solution easy to use and the interface is very good."
"The UI part is the best. The end-users can easily get started with Tableau Desktop or Tableau Online because of its user-friendliness."
"The charts and graphics are weak."
"IBM Cognos's error messages seem to be a bit ambiguous. An error will be encountered and a message will be sent out very ambiguous and after investigating the error message it could be any number of issues. There was never a direct answer to the question or a direct answer to the error messages. Sometimes it would be a generic error message for 21 different solutions. It wasn't very specific, which required a lot of digging around and trial and error trying to fix the problem. The messaging in their error messaging is something needing improvement."
"There are a lot of limitations with the out-of-the-box tool."
"I don't like that when we use Colab packages, we get less functionality. For example, you can make groups of data with Excel or with the data sets from the packages, but when you use the Colab packages directly, you can only group the data when you analyze it with Analysis Studio. I think Cognos needs to improve more on this functionality."
"Tableau and Power BI are faster than Cognos."
"I think the GIS pieces maybe not as good as we would like."
"Cognos is quite slow - it's missing the performance of the PowerPlay cubes."
"They were lacking in the initial phases of development in the area of big data, and they still need to improve that aspect of the product."
"To be the best in the market, Tableau has to improve its user interface and also look into developing implementing the best machine learning algorithms."
"I have used Power BI as well as Tableau. There are a couple of interesting features that I like in Power BI, but they are not present in Tableau. For example, in Power BI, if I am looking at country-wise population, I can type and ask for the country that has the maximum population, and it will automatically give an answer and address that query. This kind of feature is not there in Tableau. Similarly, in Power BI, for integrating with the latest ML algorithms, we have decision trees and primarily multiple machine learning algorithms. The decision tree essentially visualizes the patterns in the data. We don't have such a feature in Tableau. If Tableau can integrate with the machine learning algorithms and help us to do visualizations, it would be a wonderful combination. Most of the people are going for Tableau primarily for visualization purposes. However, in the data science industry, users want to do model building as well as tell a story. As of now, Tableau is fulfilling the requirements for visualization purposes. If they can bring it up to a level where I can use it for machine learning purposes as well as for visualization, it would be very helpful. Many people who want to do data science don't want to write a code. Tableau is anyway a drag and drop tool, and if they can provide those options as well, it will be a powerful combination."
"Navigating through activities like cleansing, reshaping, and wrangling extensive or complicated datasets could prove challenging within the Tableau environment."
"When it comes to large datasets, the data should be extracted faster."
"From the developer perspective, the data connection handling the target data set is what most needs to be improved."
"I also work as an SME on the platform side. Tableau is very nice and jazzy for the end-users, but there are pain points for the admins. Performance is something about which we hear a lot of complaints, such as the dashboard doesn't open in time. It performs well on the desktop but not on the server. I know that there is always a limitation when it comes to a huge amount of data or the complexity of the calculations, but we often hear from end-users about the performance on the server side. It is easy to drag and drop all the columns and do what we want, but if it is not going to load better on the server, users are not going to like it."
"Improvements can be made in template support. The workbook file structure is really hard to version control. If there was some sort of version control support offered particularly for workbooks, that would help big time."
"There should be more GIS features, such as location analysis, which is quite limited. There are very few location-based functionalities."
IBM Cognos is ranked 4th in Reporting with 132 reviews while Tableau is ranked 2nd in Reporting with 290 reviews. IBM Cognos is rated 8.0, while Tableau is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of IBM Cognos writes "Improved the quality of our KPIs, while reducing calls to the IT department". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Tableau writes "Provides fast data access with in-memory extracts, makes it easy to create visualizations, and saves time". IBM Cognos is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Oracle OBIEE, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform, Oracle Hyperion and Amazon QuickSight, whereas Tableau is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Amazon QuickSight, Domo, SAS Visual Analytics and Oracle OBIEE. See our IBM Cognos vs. Tableau report.
See our list of best Reporting vendors and best BI (Business Intelligence) Tools vendors.
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